Take the Ohio Bethesda church of 1808. I found a lot of information about it through my ancestor Johan Mathias Noah. I started looking at him and that branch of the family because I was wondering about all the Old Testament names. Where did they come from?

So then I came across this, one of the initial Bethesda covenants: “We do solemnly promise not to divulge the secrets of the Church to the world, and to keep the concerns of the House of God completely within itself.”

And also: I learned about Crypto-Jews from the amazing author Kathleen Alcalá. Is it possible that there were other kinds of hidden Jewish communities throughout history, yet to be discovered? Did Mennonites start out as Jews, for instance?

I’ve been interested in genealogy and family history for a while now. I like to learn more than the names and dates — I like their stories, and the “why” of where they moved, what religion they were, etc. And there is a LOT of information online. I can trace some branches of the family back to the 1600s. (One problem with that is there are “non-parental events” — that is, kids who have been assigned by history to the wrong parents, whether by adultery or adoption or who knows what all. Errors are bound to multiply as you go back in time. All the same, I feel attached to these ancestors.)

Anyway, about a month ago I got interested in some of the names in my family tree. In one set of great-great-great grandparents and their ancestors, I saw names like Zenos or Zenas, Electa, Hannibal, Sylvanus, Israel, Abraham, Sarah, Tryphena . . . there are Hebrew names, Greek names, New Testament names, names of emporers, and even full names of two U.S. Presidents. How on earth did these names get in my family tree?

I was able to trace some of those families back by their paternal lines to arrival in the early U.S. colonies. Then I looked up the history of their churches and the towns they lived in, and ultimately the history of Protestant sects from 1630 to 1840.

Found out some fascinating tidbits! I’ll list a couple of them here, with the caveat that I learned all this from surfing the Web, which is notoriously unreliable. Most of this came from Wikipedia and the rest from random places.

1. The first two Puritan colonies were very different. The Mayflower Pilgrims were separatists — they wanted to break completely with the Church of England. The Massachusetts Bay Colony wanted to reform it instead. Both established theocracies, which survived at first only because there was a civil war distracting the King of England. Power and influence of these two colonies waned as England settled its civil war and took a greater role in colony governance, more Europeans moved to the U.S. (giving people a chance to flee the Puritan colonies), and ultimately England revoked the charter of one or the other or both.

2. Puritans had Hebrew names and modeled their theocracies after laws in the Hebrew Bible. They identified strongly with the persecution of the Jews, since they had been persecuted as well.

3. Puritans were from the beginning very invested in democracy — that is, of the male members of the church.

4. By the 1690s, the influence of the Puritans had waned, but a lot of the beliefs and traditions carried on in other religions until at least the 1840s. This is where it gets super interesting, though — there were no less than three revival movements, called “Great Awakenings,” where everything got turned on its head. They took place in approximately the 1730s, the 1790s, and the 1820s (give or take a couple of decades).

With that context in mind, here are a couple family stories.

John Mathew Noah came to the U.S. in colonial times as an indentured servant and eventually worked his way up to being fairly wealthy. He left Massachusetts for Ohio in the early 1800s, where he participated in the founding of a church called Bethesda.

Like Puritan churches, it had covenants to enforce church attendance and personal behavior. A decade or so later, the church was rocked by the Third Great Awakening and a schism developed. Some members wanted to keep the covenants, and some, including John Noah, wanted to throw them out entirely.

The notes of church meetings were kept, so I got to read an account of the schism, which was fascinating! There were a series of votes that kept getting overturned, and eventually, John Noah and ten to seventeen others were excluded from the church. He went on to help found a second church in another town. Meanwhile . . .

. . . his daughter, Margaret Haynes Noah, and her husband joined the Mormon Church, along with several other members of the Bethesda church. Her husband was . . .

. . . Charles Hulet, a descendent of Puritans, including the Hathorne family, and a distant relation of the leader of the Salem Witch Trials and of Nathaniel Hawthorne. His father, Sylvanus Hulet, had fought in the Revolutionary War, then disappeared from historical records for seven years and emerged married to . . .

. . . Mary Ann Lewis, whose parentage has not been traced, aside from a family story that her grandmother was a Native American named Running Deer and her grandfather was a white man referred to as Charles Sq**man (that’s a derogatory term that was used for whites who married Native Americans). This history, connected to the fact that the LDS church had a focus on converting Native Americans, adds up to something, but I can’t for the life of me tell what!

I see so many recurring patterns. Idealism, the desire to throw out all the old rules, restlessness, the willingness to pick up and move your entire family for the sake of religion, and interest in new forms of government. The desire for theocracy and the desire for its opposite.

That’s just one small segment of my family. This is the family of my great-great-great grandparent and beyond, and she (Catherine Hulet) is only one of thirty-two great-great-great grandparents. (If I counted right!) It contains so much drama and so many different kinds of people!

Folks, the history of the U.S. is so much stranger and more complicated than we could ever imagine.